Bellum omnium contra omnes? No! Nice guys finish first [Part 2]

Does the "Will to power" requires the "domestication of man" to reach the best results possible? Commons sense suggests that it's false, because usually multiple individuals act rationally only consulting their own self interest. This selfishness fits also perfectly with the most common interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy. Nevertheless this idea resulted to be completely wrong.


In 1968 the biologist Garret Hardin published in the journal "Science" an article called "The tragedy of commons". It is based on the analisys of the consequences of a selfish exploitation on a limited amount of shared resources.

If an individual had the opportunity to control the entire resource, the exploitation wouldn't reach the level of the shared one.Here every individual will selfishly try to achieve the greatest result possible, even thought it cannot be supported by the shared resource if all the subjects behaved this way.


This kind of selfish exploitation can be generalized under the "Prisoner's dilemma". This is based on the fact that two individuals may not agree, even though it appears to be the best to do so.

According to this game theory defection is favorable if the other chooses to cooperate, while it's unfavorable if also the other one defects. If we consider the sum of both the individuals, we see that the cooperation by both sides is the most favorable.

Cooperating on the other hand is favorable only if we are sure that also the other one will be doing so. The only way to gain profit by cooperation as an individual is "Tit for tat", or equivalent retaliation. The idea is to cooperate at first, then respond in kind to an opponent's previous action. If the opponent previously was cooperative, the response is cooperative. If not, the response is not. This is also known as reciprocal altruism in biology.

Richard Dawkins proposed this theory in the "Selfish Gene", where he identified this cooperative strategy as the most successful under an evolutionary point of view. Those individuals are cooperative if it's they're first encounter with another individual, so that they are more likely to get cooperation in return. If this happens a cooperative connection is established between them. If it doesn't the individual won't cooperate anymore with this particular individual. This means that the selfish one will gain advantages only by the generous one (under every possible condition), and that those ones will gain advantages by their similar and the moderate cooperators. The most successful one is going to be the moderate cooperator, while others will be stucked in "Prisoner's dilemma".


This explains under a biological point of view why Nietzsche's "Will to Power" leads to a "domestication of man". Our will to power goes toward the biggest successes achievable. In this case the biggest results are obtained by cooperation, and so our will conducts us  to a social-based life.


Maybe Hobbes was right and homo homini lupus est, but this trend had to be bent to face the possibility of social life, and all the related benefits.